Investigation: Nearly 1,000 Native children died in federal boarding schools

Investigation: Nearly 1,000 Native children died in federal boarding schools

Nearly 1,000 Native American children died or were killed while forced to attend U.S. government-affiliated boarding schools, according to a report by the Interior Department.  

Pictured above, the entrance to the former Genoa U.S. Indian School in 2021 in Genoa, Nebraska where researchers found at least 87 Native American children have died.

The children are buried in 74 unmarked and marked graves, as tribes assess repatriation of remains and protection options more than five decades after U.S. policy shifted away from the practice. Nearly 19,000 children were estimated to be kidnapped from their families, often at gunpoint, and enrolled in government schools with the aim of assimilation, decimating tribal cultures, and reducing land possession.  

While the department acknowledged the figures are underestimated, the data provide the fullest picture of the system's scale, marking the end of a three-year initiative to unearth the toll and legacies of the nearly two-century long U.S. policy, The 74 reports. Research was obscured by inconsistent public record keeping and that many records are held by private religious institutions.

The remains of 973 children were found at 65 schools and their surrounding communities, but the Department is withholding their locations "in order to protect against well-documented grave-robbing, vandalism, and other disturbances to Indian burial sites." 

The final report, released last week, also documented how the boarding school system negatively impacted genetics and health outcomes for Native families, who for generations have had the nation's highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, arthritis, and cancer. 

"As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past," Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland wrote in the report's opening letter. "Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States."  

Oral testimonies from hundreds of genocide survivors, many sharing for the first time during a Road to Healing tour, catalog horrific physical and psychological abuse. 

Children regularly witnessed each other raped in their beds and in bathrooms, by priests, teachers, and school staff, according to the report, and seeing peers, aged 11, 12, or 13, sent home in the middle of the school year pregnant.

One Montana school implemented night checks, shining flashlights randomly into kids' eyes as they slept. In some instances, kids were sent to sleep in basements as punishment, but "forgotten" for hours or days. Many more were subject to "outing," sent to live temporarily with nearby white, often Quaker families, and used for free labor.  

"I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents, and just wanting to go home," a survivor from Michigan recounted. "And I remember one girl was a bedwetter, and they made her scrub the entire bathroom on her hands and knees with her toothbrush."

On arrival, children were often stripped, their hair cut—against sacred cultural norms—provided uniforms and numbers. 

"We [were] never called by our name, we were all called by our numbers. My number was 77, too because my sister was there before me and her number was 77… it was marked on everything you owned," said one Alaska survivor.

Living thousands of miles from home with little hope of escape, children witnessed every aspect of their identities and prior life erased and replaced—belief systems, language, hair, and dress. 

"Food was also weaponized in Indian boarding school settings, in sharp contrast to traditional Native American practices of food as medicine," the report stated. "Food that was seen by Federal Indian boarding school staff to be reminiscent of Native American culture was not allowed, and survivors frequently spoke of being forced to eat highly processed, unfamiliar, or spoiled food." 

A survivor from Alaska described the impact of suddenly eating only processed, canned meats and vegetables, and powdered milk and eggs: "Of course, we all got violently ill because our bodies couldn't process changing our diet over from our traditional Native foods. We had vomiting, we had diarrhea, we had both and we were often punished for soiling our pants or clothing or bedding and we got beaten for that." 

Over $23 billion, adjusted for 2023 inflation, was invested in the federal Indian boarding school 

system between 1871 and 1969. The figure omits child labor estimates which cut down operation costs: Children often maintained school infrastructure, digging for plumbing or maintaining roofs. 

The U.S. government operated and supported 417 schools, of which 210 were run by predominantly Protestant or Catholic religious groups, across 37 states and territories. 

The final death and enrollment counts do not take into account records from the 1,025 "other institutions," including day schools and orphanages which did not receive federal funding, where children were subject to similar abuses in pursuit of the government's explicit policy goal of mass assimilation. 

"I was told I wouldn't make a good mother. And I would tell God when I have children I will love them and care for them. And treat them like a person, because in boarding school you're not a person. You're not even a human being," said another survivor from Minnesota. 

Resistance was common, with runaways, secret language use, and challenges when government agents entered reservation land to take children. 

A year after 104 children were taken from the Third Mesa of Hopi to attend Keams Canyon Boarding School, Hopi tribal leaders refused armed government agents. Nineteen leaders were taken as prisoners of war, locked up in an underground cell on Alcatraz.

Even after the residential boarding school system fell out of favor politically, forced removal continued with the Indian Adoption Project from 1958-68, when up to 35% of Native children were removed from their families after discriminatory welfare investigations and overwhelmingly placed in non-Indian homes. 

The disparities, as intended, were clear: In Minnesota, Native children were placed in foster care and adopted five times as often as non-Indian families; in Washington, adoption rates were 19 times greater. 

The practice was widespread until 1978 with passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, the first time Congress acknowledged, "wholesale separation of Indian children from their families is perhaps the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today," and denounced forced child removal and assimilation. 

Last year, ICWA was challenged in the Supreme Court after white parents—who had already 

won custody to adopt a Cherokee and Diné child over a family from the Navajo nation, in opposition to ICWA's protections to prioritize adoptions within their culture—filed a federal lawsuit alleging the law was discriminatory. Three other white couples followed. The court ultimately upheld ICWA in a 7-2 decision. All of the children had Native relatives that wanted to raise them, but only one Ojibwe grandmother, after six years, won their custody battle.

In pursuit of healing and reconciliation with tribal nations, the report recommended investments in family reunification, education, first language revitalization, identification, and repatriation of childrens' remains, healthcare, and creation of public memorials or education to share information about the system. 

Several residential schools are in operation—without assimilationist aims or systematic violence. A new Senate bill has bipartisan support and will soon reach a vote to establish a truth and healing commission and three advisory bodies over a six year period, which Native leaders have said is "long overdue." Members of at least seven tribes in Arizona and New Mexico are now eligible to file claims against the Franciscan Friars of California for clergy sexual abuse. 

"We're not just people here on this earth taking up space," said Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, addressing survivors and descendants during the Road to Healing tour. "We have an obligation to honor the legacy of our ancestors, so they didn't starve in vain, so they didn't die in vain, so they weren't ripped away from their mother's arms in vain." 

Survivor testimonies from the Interior Department's Road to Healing tour

"I would like to say my aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children. No children in the village."– Alaska

"My sister talked about being put in the closet with the mops and the brooms. And, to this day, she can't sleep without a light on. She could be deep in her sleep, and as soon as somebody turns off the bathroom light, she wakes up screaming. And she's a grandmother today. She doesn't know where this comes from." – Washington

"Sometimes they would forget that they had put us down in the basement. Wouldn't get out of there until early morning, and it was—maybe that's why I'm afraid of the dark now. I don't know. I leave the light on in my bedroom. Even today. That was a—that was hurt—hard for me. I still think about those nights when I had to sit in the basement. I was afraid of the dark. And I survived there for six years." – Montana

"…They said 'We're going to run away and we're going to go home and when we get home, we'll send for you.' … They waved to us and were just really happy… they didn't know they were on—the school is on an island and the next morning, we went into the dining hall and they all came in … Their heads were shaven and they were all wearing little black and white prison suits and us girls just started crying." – Alaska

"The sad part about it is a lot of us had to watch the priest sodomize our classmates … Nobody wants to share things like that. I've learned how to be tough because you couldn't cry. Couldn't do that." – South Dakota

"They came in, they stripped them down, put all their clothes, the food they bring in, dry caribou, salmon, and stuff like that, they put it all on the side. They made them go through the shower, shave them, give them their uniform and a number … I probably cried when they took all their clothes down there and burned them in the furnace, all the beautiful, beautiful parkas and everything." – Alaska

"My grandpa's last words were, 'We're going to experience some things,' in Cheyenne… Culturally, our hair is sacred. 'We do not cut our hair, but they're going to do that to you. You get there, your black braids are not going to come home.' And that was hard. My braids got cut off. Excuse me. Just remembering what happened to some of us first day of school." – Montana

"Once I graduated, I had to go straight to the Marine Corps because I had no parents, nobody there when I finished … to this day, I know it affected my sister, because I haven't seen her in probably 30 years, and she's been in and out of prison ever since. She's never been back to the Indian reservation … I don't have a very good relationship with my mother, because by the time we started talking again she – there's a lot of feelings that was brought up just because of separation." – California

"I experience feelings of abandonment because I think of my mother standing on that sidewalk as we were loaded into the green bus to be taken to a boarding school. And I can see it—still have the image of my mom burned in my brain and in my heart where she was crying. What does a mother think? She was helpless." – Arizona

"I don't remember ever getting a hug from my mom. I don't remember, ever, my mother telling me she loved me. I remember getting whipped with a switch and finally being able to go live with my father because they didn't live together anymore … He never did anything like that. He said, 'That's because of the schools.'" – Washington

"To this day I can still see that nun standing and she said, 'Here,' she gave me a bag and I said, 'Oh, what is it?' 'Oh, it's from your brother.' 'Oh, is he here?' 'No, he's dead.' I could still see her standing there and I was still a little girl. And I thanked her." – Minnesota

"I said to Sister Naomi, I think I'm going to go home now. She leaned way over into my face and said, 'You're not going anywhere, you're going to be here for a long, long time.' So, I choked back my tears and I hid inside myself." – Michigan